David McDiarmid's erotic medium conveys his potent message

Robert Nelson

Heart and Hand, cotton / acrylic paint, designed and painted by David McDiarmid, New York, 1984.

David McDiarmid When This You See Remember MeNGV Australia, Federation SquareUntil August 31

Busy, strident and bracing, the work of David McDiarmid (1952–95) pushes aesthetics into a tight place. An example is a mosaic of mirror-tape showing a man who bends over while drawing his cheeks apart, with his body plastered in male names and a head of cubic shape with the letters AIDS distributed in a swastika.

The excellent retrospective at the NGV confronts you with more than you necessarily want to see; but works such as Body Image from 1990 have more than shock value. The reflective tiles scintillate in spectral transience, changing their colours holographically according to your movement. The image is blunt and horny but also melancholy and scary; and similarly the medium impenetrable, deflecting the gaze and forcing you to change perspective.

Another reflective work shows the flames of Hell around a schematised head and shoulders with a heart in the centre of the face. Holding this love-icon is a hazard triangle attended by the words "discard after use".

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The heart, love itself and the whole person are of limited value, dispensable, to be tossed out after outrunning their benefit to another person. This fatalistic match of image and word has poetic resonance with another throw-away love apparatus, a condom, which is much extolled in other works.

Humour that pairs the erotic with the mechanical tickled McDiarmid's fancy from early days, as when he depicts lubricant with the words "Tube of joy". Given that Johnson is also slang for penis, McDiarmid's relish in the pharmaceutical manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, makes the image especially slippery.

McDiarmid loved words and graphic design, which helped him communicate to a large audience.

The most famous word works are the Rainbow Aphorisms, where large lettering is cast against a spectrum of the primary and secondary colours. The lettering is coloured in a hue that complements the background, which makes the typography almost hallucinogenic.

Created after the artist had contracted AIDS, the content is sometimes maudlin, as in Honey, have you got it? or So many pills so little time sweetie. The deeper sentiment, however, is not about suffering but the paradox of a person's presence which is retained beyond life. An example is Don’t forget to remember.

Despite the demonstrative sexuality and randy capricious absorption in erotic play, a strong sense of purpose pervades the exhibition that brings the sometimes outrageous spectacle into the realm of taste. No penis is gratuitous.

In the wake of feminism and sexual liberation, with its catchcry of "the personal is political", McDiarmid's expression of the erotic is an act of protest as well as festivity. When McDiarmid began in full fervour, gay sex was not only reviled but illegal; and as he ended his career, homosexuality seemed to pass from the police to the undertaker. He began his expose of gay eroticism in the spirit of a demonstration and ended it as an act of compassion.

It's tempting to read McDiarmid's output through his biography. His life story is compelling and it makes a lot of sense to see it as central to McDiarmid's works. The biography, which is saturated in sexual practice, does more than contextualise the work: the personal story forms the basis of the work.

An excellent catalogue edited by curator Sally Gray explores the artist's life in learned studies that historicise the several bodies of work on show. The examples include textiles and fashion, urban interventions as an activist, the artist's own records and the famous graphic works.

The conceptual high point of the show is a pair of black-and-white works that spin out tiles from a centre, with a rectangular pattern crossing over the radial lines in a kind of geometric helix. Depending on your psychology, you either read the lines as emanating from a wellspring or sucked into a gurgler. Called Yes and no, the one is light and the other predominantly dark.

The dire binary, which counts for life and death, HIV- or HIV+, in and out, won't I or will I, is magically deconstructed. Yes and no, even though opposite, are made from much the same thing but cause you to see things from a radically different perspective.